A friend of mine is in the process of digitizing her own journals. Because she has written in a journal so regularly for about a decade or more, this is also a significant feat. However, having her journals digitized will serve as insurance for the physical journals, in case anything ever happens to them. Additionally, now that her journals are digitized, they could easily be backed up in multiple locations online or in a hard drive. Other natural benefits for digitizing the journals include the fact that they are now searchable in something as simple as most word processor applications. In the future, as digital and online learning, research, and sharing become even more commonplace, it would be a good idea anyways to digitize one’s journals. Doing this time-intensive task now saves effort down the road.
As I read through Yale’s project on applying digital humanities research approaches to what they identify as “2,700 issues, each with a distinct cover” (and content) of Vogue, I thought about the effort that must have been put into compiling these magazine issues. Because the earliest issues of the magazine look to have been published in the late 1800’s, many issues must have needed to be scanned in decades after their publication. However, with the effort and labor costs that were needed to digitize all copies of Vogue, natural benefits occurred similar to those my friend has had with the digitization of her own journals. All 2,700 issues of Vogue are now probably backed up in a myriad of locations online or in hard drives. The “About” page of Yale’s project states, “Yale University Library had purchased a perpetual access license, which conferred rights to the use of raw files for scholarly research.” It sounds like Vogue or whoever owns the rights to these issues has been able to make money from licensing a vast amount of digitized information. Ultimately, even though digitizing large amounts of historical creative work and information is a very taxing project, many benefits can occur down the road.
Sources: http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/vogue/coveraverages/
http://dh.library.yale.edu/projects/vogue/about.shtml
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
